Samsung is building a smart cities network in South Korea

Samsung is partnering with SK Telecom, South Korea's largest wireless carrier, to build a nationwide network for connecting IoT devices for smart cities throughout South Korea, according to The Verge.

The network will be built on the LoRaWAN standard, a standard for Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) that can connect devices over long distances with little battery power consumption.

This makes LPWANs a good option for connecting smart cities. They can connect a large number of devices over a wide geographic area, and they typically cost far less than cellular networks charge for a data connection. So they can easily connect a network of sensors, smart streetlights, and smart meters across a city at a relatively low price. Also, the low power consumption of LPWANs means that devices connected to them have a long battery life.

Other LPWAN carriers are also focusing on smart cities use cases. Sigfox, which builds its own proprietary LPWANs, announced plans recently to build networks in 100 cities in the US this year.

Samsung and SK Telecom will first test their LoRaWAN-based network in the Korean city of Daegu. Samsung said in a statement that the network will be used to connect sensors across the city that will collect data about traffic, weather conditions, and air pollution.

South Korea already has one of the world's most advanced smart cities implementations in the city of Songdo, which was built from the ground up as a connected urban environment. Samsung and SK Telecom plan to roll out their LoRaWAN-based network to the rest of South Korea later this year. The network should help make the country a center for smart cities innovation by providing a cheap way to connect urban infrastructure to the internet.

Urbanization will force cities around the world to cope with growing populations, traffic congestion, and pollution in the coming years. Faced with these mounting pressures, city governments are turning to IoT technologies to deliver services more efficiently and improve their citizens' quality of life.

Many cities are already connecting their infrastructure to IoT devices like sensors and smart meters. But few cities are as far along in that effort as Barcelona.

Jonathan Camhi, research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on smart cities that examines how other municipalities can learn from Barcelona's development into a smart city, how cities' investments in IoT technologies will grow over time, and how those investments will impact urban economies worldwide.

Here are some of the key findings from the report:

IoT deployments will create $421 billion in economic value for cities worldwide in 2019. That economic value will be derived from revenues from IoT device installations and sales and savings from efficiency gains in city services.

Globally, cities' investments in IoT technologies will increase by $97 billion between 2015-2019. This will make up the bulk of government investment in IoT technologies, dwarfing the amount of money spent on other government IoT use cases like military drones and robots.

The number of IoT devices installed in cities will will increase by more than 5 billion in the next four years, creating a massive opportunity for IoT hardware manufacturers and software vendors.

IoT technologies will deliver a broad range of benefits for cities including reducing traffic congestion and air pollution, improving public safety, and providing new ways for governments to interact with their citizens.

In this report we will also:

Define the difference between connected vs smart cities.

Identify key challenges for municipalities in developing smart cities and illustrate how some cities are already solving those obstacles.

Provide key takeaways from Barcelona's IoT strategy, which has earned it recognition as the world's smartest city.

Illustrate how the benefits of connecting legacy infrastructure can be magnified through data aggregation and analysis.

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